With all these sequels and remakes, Diggstown 2 can’t be far behind. We hope.

Looks like for the foreseeable future, I’ll only be blogging Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Or just three days a week. At some point, I may go back to an every day schedule, but for now we’re scaling back.

But you’re not going to get any less news or insight. I normally wrote about 5,000 words a week blogging every day (1,000 words a day), and I’m going to try and keep it to around 5,000 words a week. It’s just going to be more extensive, so you’re going to have to read a little extra when I do post.

I thought this would be a little difficult and tedious for the reader — then I went through the bookmarks I had squirrelled away over the last two days and realized there was still a lot to talk about.

So grab an extra five minutes per blog and you should be golden. As always, if you want to know exactly when I’m posting, friend PopRox on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

Today’s links:

whatever happens, don't forget about these guys

Remember two weeks ago when we all patted the backs of Bryan Singer, producer Lauren Shuler Donner and 20th Century Fox for gulping down their pride and letting Singer direct X-Men: First Class? ‘Member, ‘member? That was fun. Short-lived, but fun. Singer, who directed the first two X-Men and has watched the third and the Wolverine spin-off spiral away from the original vision he had, originally was announced as the director for First Class. But Fox has shuffled its own deck and said Singer isn’t available to direct the next X-Men because he’s got a commitment to another Fox movie, Jack the Giant Killer. Here’s how it must have happened: The goodwill parade of Singer coming back to the franchise swept up everyone at Fox because X-Men is an extreme moneymaker. The Jack the Giant Killer team all looked at each other with “WTF???” looks on their faces, but toed the company line and kept their mouths shut, hoping everything would get resolved by itself. Then Fox even let Singer and Shuler Donner be interviewed by the LA Times — that’s when the JGK people had enough. They went to the Fox offices raising hell until someone at Fox finally called Singer, who then explained, “I don’t know, they’re both your movies, I figured you thought it was cool.” This was followed by the entire PR staff at Fox being fired and possibly decapitated. But more likely just fired. Then the JGK people started shaking signed contracts in front of the Fox honchos, and that was that. Singer was out of the director’s chair for First Class, back with JGK and Fox executives still are trying to stop their heads from spinning. Now pay attention here: You’ve got a big-time director (Singer) directing his second-choice movie at the behest of the studio that owns both movies, a top-line franchise reboot without a director, the person that is hired to direct will be using Singer’s story and a studio that isn’t getting what it wants even though it owns both movies. Yeesh. And yeah, I just wrote more than 300 words on this thing. It fascinates me that much.

It’s not all bad at Fox, especially post-Avatar. Because the studio now has money to work with, it’s looking like it will revive one of its biggest blockbusters ever with two sequels to Independence Day. The biggest challenge was getting Will Smith to sign on, but it looks like he’s on board for both. So please, don’t try any kind of twist at the end of the second one where he may or may not be dead. We know he’s not since he’s coming back for the third. It will be nice to get a technologically advanced update of ID4, since it’s terribly distracting rewatching the original and watching the model of Los Angeles be destroyed. It looks like it was made by a teen intern who was more worried about a Blossom cliffhanger than the movie. I’ll even let them do a Star-Wars-like re-release to get rid of that.

Don’t worry about the cast of The Hangover coming back for a second movie — they’re all signed, sealed and delivered. Not that there would have been much doubt. With the paydays these guys will be getting, as long as the script didn’t start with something corny like “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … ” and then open with them back in Vegas, them not coming back would have been more surprising than Hickory High losing the 1952 Indiana State Championship game. The only one that probably had reservations over the artistic impressions of doing a sequel would have been Zach Galgdfreosfukhdfgous, but the producers probably showed him tape of G-Force and he had no comeback. Good to know there will be new pronunciations of politically incorrect terms coming next year:

Not that anyone asked, but revered crime author Elmore Leonard, whose character Raylan Givens is the main character of the FX series Justified, is happy with the character and the show. So how come I’m not? I fell asleep last week watching it and didn’t get much out of last night’s episode either, though it was an improvement. I’m two episodes from bailing, especially since V came back on Tuesdays last night and Glee comes back in two weeks. Then again, I forgot how boring V really is until I watched it last night. Gimme an alien baby pretty soon or I’m gone.

Not that anyone is going to notice or care, but according to Zach Braff’s Facebook page, it looks like the new version of Scrubs is dead. Scrubs is like Vigo in Ghostbusters 2. It’s been poisoned, shot, stabbed, stretched, disemboweled, hung, drawn and quartered, but it still keeps coming back. So it’s probably best to wait and see if ABC renews it in May. But it sure looks like we’ve seen the last of Sacred Heart. It’s lasted a remarkable two years past its intended series finale. In those two years, ABC didn’t give it much better play than the shoddy treatment it got at NBC. When ABC canceled Hank in October, it should have slid Scrubs right into that Wednesday night comedy lineup, moving The Middle to 8 p.m. and Scrubs to 8:30. The fact that it didn’t gave the impression before this season even started that ABC was just burning off episodes. As much as it’s been trampled in the past couple years, it’s important to remember that in its prime, this was one of the funniest, most inventive shows on TV. Even when it wasn’t in its prime, it was still churning out great, original ideas you couldn’t see anywhere else:

why did i have to read that stupid spoiler???

Here’s another reason to hate DirecTV subscribers — we mere peons won’t be able to see the latest season of Friday Night Lights for an extra week. That makes me angry. ANGRY!!! What makes me even more angry is that it took me 18 months to accidentally stumble across a spoiler for the upcoming season, but it finally happened last week and it gave away the final stinkin’ scene of the season and the fate of my favorite character on the show. Maybe my favorite character on TV. It’s enough to make me think of not even watching this year, that’s how angry I am.

What the heck took so long for Jon Heder to get a TV show? And what the heck possessed him to leave it so close to the start date? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of clamoring for Benchwarmers 2, so he should probably consider doing PetSmart commercials if someone was nice enough to give him a job. He’s dangerously close to being labeled the one-hit-wonder actor of his generation. Even more troubling is that he risked alienating producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, both of whom have a connection or two in the comedy biz.

From Jon Heder big-timing Comedy Central — have no doubt, that’s what he did — to actors who instead don’t take themselves too seriously by spoofing their own work. I love these kinds of things. The Arrested Development example at #5 is one of my favorites. The hardest I ever laughed at the show is included in there, when Ron Howard as the narrator vehemently opposed any connection to the show making fun of Andy Griffith, a nod to Howard’s boyhood days as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show. For some reason the bank robbery scene in Maverick always cracks me up too. You know what had nothing to do with actors spoofing themselves in Arrested Development? The chicken dances. Just because.

It sure sounds like a good idea to remake Godzilla. Is there ever a bad time to do it? Oh, wait, there is — in May of 1998 to produce one of my worst in-theater experiences ever. I can clearly point to that movie as the time I started becoming completely cynical about Hollywood blockbusters. Following it up with Armageddon six weeks later just abotu sent me off the deep end. I remember walking out of the Mountainside Loews in New Jersey after Godzilla being quoted as saying, “It was OK,” but the more I thought about it the more I completely hated it and everything about it. Repeated viewings confirm it’s one of the top 10 worst movies I ever saw in the theaters — and Armageddon doesn’t even make that list.

I touched on High Fidelity last week talking about John Cusack without realizing it turns 10 years old today. I didn’t see it in the theater, but listened to my Nick Hornsby-fan friends rave about it enough I caught it on tape (not DVD) a couple months later while living at home — watching it with my parents and girlfriend. Let’s just say I was the only one consistently laughing at it. You can talk about High Fidelityas a love story, or as one man’s journey to find his true soulmate. But more than anything, this is a guy movie. Maybe not in the way Die Hard or Rambo are guy movies, because Rob Gordon is the exact opposite of someone like Harry Stamper. And that’s why we love him. He’s completely effed-up, has no idea what he’s doing with his life and makes a complete ass of himself over a girl. Well, over six girls. When John McClane gets screwed up with his wife, he goes out and kills bad guys. From what I understand, that doesn’t really happen. When Rob Gordon has problems with his girlfriend, he retreats into a pitiful shell of self-loathing and jealousy the likes of which we rarely see in movies. Now that happens. I’m evidence. Every guy who saw this knows exactly how Rob felt — but didn’t dare admit it to the girl we went to see it with. It doesn’t hurt that it backed up the boderline unhealthy list obsession my friends and I have always shared:

where's the ram?

Movie posters are only so big — but isn’t someone missing from the new Iron Man 2 poster? Let’s see, there’s Robert Downey Jr., new cast member Don Cheadle, the obligatory hot chicks in Scarlett Johansson and Gweneth Paltrow — but where’s Mickey Rourke? Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or maybe it’s just a matter of the impossibility of squeezing five people onto the poster. It could be nothing. But in the first and second trailers, Rourke’s Whiplash seems like an important character of the movie, and he’s the only one with his name above the title that isn’t in the poster. Does that worry anyone else other than me? The studio could be trying to downplay his character, his performance or his overall participation. Or maybe because he’s such a career basket-case that the studio didn’t want to risk putting him on the poster only to hear the news on May 5 “Rourke arrested in bizarre DUI-sex-tape scandal.” Whatever the reason, it’s an interesting exclusion.

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